A need often arises for people to meet and share information, exchange data or documents, discuss topics, or collaborate in preparing various documents. It may not be desirable, or possible, for all of the participants in a meeting to be in the same physical location at the same time, in which case meeting objectives may be achieved using communication equipment or networks, and tools such as software tools for facilitating remote collaboration in a multimedia collaboration session.
It can be useful for such a session to include a variety of media types that include the participants' voices, video images, shared documents, text messages, drawings, computer screen images, etc.
Several systems exist for teleconferencing or telecollaboration; in several such systems session information disappears a certain time after the session ends. For instance, a meeting participant that wants to see material presented during a previous session may not be able to find it several weeks after the session ended.
Some systems require a conference ID for each sessions, and some require a distinct Conference ID and or user ID for sessions conducted using different types of media, for example if a user connects to a session via a telephone and via a computer. Some systems don't allow a user to be connected simultaneously from several devices, for instance both from a telephone and from a computer. In many systems the audio portion is managed on phones in a phone conference in parallel to a data collaboration session on a different system—in this case each of the sessions has a different conference ID or entry code.
Another drawback of some prior art systems is that they allocate resources in advance and not only when a session actually starts. For instance some systems allocate telephony ports in advance, sometimes a long time ahead. If the session does not start as planed the allocated resources are released.
Therefore, it would be beneficial to provide improved systems and methods for collaboration, which for example can overcome the illustrative drawbacks of existing collaboration tools mentioned or provide new functionality to users.